[tl;dr – the code for my sessions is available further down in this post on my github]

It’s been a very long week, but a very good one. Windows Azure Mobile Services got it’s first large piece of airtime at the BUILD conference and the reaction has been great. Here’s just a couple of my favorite quotes so far from the week:

“Mobile Services is the best thing at BUILD, and there’s been a lot of cool stuff at BUILD” – Attendee in person

Hackathon

The BUILD team also hosted a hackathon and Mobile Services featured prominently. In fact two of the three winners of the hackathon was built on Mobile Services and you can watch the team talk about their experience in their live interview on Channel 9 (link to come when the content goes live). Again, some favorite quotes from the winning teams (some of which were mentored by the incredible Paul Batum):

“I was watching the Mobile services talk on the live stream, and as I was watching it I started hooking it up. By the time he finished his talk, I got the backend for our app done” – Social Squares, winner

“We got together on Monday and we did a lot of work – he did a service layer, I did a web service layer, we did bunch of stuff that would help [our app] to communicate, and then we went to Josh’s session… and we threw everything away and used Mobile Services. What took us roughly 2000 lines of code, we got for free with Mobile Services” – QBranch, winner

We take a Windows Phone 8 application that has no connectivity and uses no cloud services, to building out a whole connected scenario in 60 minutes. There’s a lot of live coding, risk and we even get (entirely by coincidence) James Chambers up on stage for some audience interaction that doesn’t quite go to plan! The code for this is up on github here (download zip).

In this session, I build a Windows 8 application starting from the Mobile Services quickstart, going into some detail on authentication, scripts and push notifications including managing channels. The code for is up on github here (download zip) and – due to popular demand I created a C# version of the Windows 8 client. The Windows Phone client was pretty easy – I’ll leave that as an exercise for the reader.

Paul and I were also interviewed by Scott Hanselman on Channel 9 Live – right after the keynote. We had a blast talking to Scott about Mobile Services and got to answer some questions coming in from the audience.

One of the outcomes of the Channel 9 interview was we promised to setup a Mobile Services UserVoice. We never want to break a promise on Mobile Services so here you go: http://mobileservices.uservoice.com – so please log your requests and get voting! Don’t forget about our forums and always feel free to reach out to me on twitter @joshtwist.